Cortana for Android adds birthday reminders and improved calendar support in the latest update

Microsoft introduced Cortana for Windows with the release of Windows 10 – since then, it has seen a release on Android as well as iOS. It’s a brave new world, where Microsoft supports Linux and beats Apple at its own game.

While Microsoft introduced the personal assistant offering pretty late into the show – it didn’t take it very long to ramp up its efforts and bring something worthwhile to Windows users. Cortana can easily compete with Google’s Assistant and Apple’s Siri, though it seems Google still has a slight edge over it when it comes to natural language recognition.

The latest update for Cortana on Android bumps the version to 1.9.12 and adds a few new features while fixing a few bugs – including some severe ones that caused Cortana to crash.

What’s New

Cortana can now remind you of upcoming birthdays – it fetches those dates from your Outlook calendar.

The app now also lets you connect multiple calendars, in case you have two separate calendars for whatever reason – perhaps, work and personal events, as most do.

If none of these features matter to you – perhaps these improvements will do: the location accuracy for location-based reminders is now improved, and so is the meeting retrieval experience.

If you were suffering from random crashes while using the app – give it a try once more, as this update fixes a lot of the issues that caused Cortana to crash.

Availability

The latest update is available to all Cortana users – it’s not limited to Insiders or Beta testers – and is rolling out via the Google Play Store. The rollout, of course, is done at a pace Microsoft is comfortable with – if you don’t have the update, have some patience instead.